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Upscaling Illiberalism: Class, Contradiction, and the Rise and Rise of the Populist Right in Post-socialist Central Europe

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Abstract

Recent liberal political science analysis has highlighted media, manipulation, and populist political trickery in the apparently sudden rise of the new Right in Europe and the USA. I suggest that a robust engagement with the actual social transformations over which liberalism has presided since 1989 is imperative. Anthropological work on class processes and the rise of neo-nationalist populism in Central and Eastern Europe has been strong in developing a more relational, processual, and embedded vision. In the current paper, I am looking at the phases and spaces of the rise of illiberalism as a popular political sensibility in Central and Eastern Europe. In particular, I am interested in its gradual upscaling to the level of the nation state and, through the “Visegrad bloc” to the EU. I argue that both the emergence and step-by-step upscaling of illiberal political sensibilities are explained by class relational processes and the regionally uneven Polanyi-type “countermovements” against liberalizations that they brought forth.

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Notes

  1. Personal communication.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

    Don Kalb

  2. Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Don Kalb

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  1. Don Kalb
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Correspondence to Don Kalb.

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Kalb, D. Upscaling Illiberalism: Class, Contradiction, and the Rise and Rise of the Populist Right in Post-socialist Central Europe. Fudan J. Hum. Soc. Sci. 11, 303–321 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40647-018-0221-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40647-018-0221-3

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